European HPV Championships 1992 in München, Germany.
I keep looking at this picture with
a magnifying glass and cannot make up my mind if it is
a factory product, or just a one- off homebuilt
prototype of some motivated enthusiast's. I keep looking at
the details, comparing with all I ever learned as an
industrial designer, and still cannot tell which one it could have
been.
Because not only
was it so well finished, of so perfect quality, but the
frame design itself seemed so appropriate for the job. All design
is about compromise. An idea may be ever so grand, but if it's
physically difficult to achieve, then it must be adapted to suit
the constraints and limitations of the manufacturing (and, in real
life also, the marketing and other) process(es). And here
I could see directly where those adaptations were made, why
the frame utilized an otherwise hard-to- explain combination of
bent round tube, and straight square ones. And other such
details.
Unfortunately, I
never found out. I kept vigil by the parked bike for well over an
hour hoping to meet the rider, but he or she wasn't anywhere near.
And then the bike vanished, too. Just as well I have a photo to
prove to myself it ever existed.
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